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About the GPU Users Group, Inc.

Submitted by DomAdmin on Sat, 2011-09-03 19:51

The GPU Users Group is a charitable non-profit organization founded by a group of computer hobbyists and enthusiasts who have a common interest: using off-the-shelf computers for processing, at high speed, large amounts of distributed data for leading scientific research projects by using inexpensive Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) commonly found in computer video cards. This is also known as High Performance Computing, or HPC.

GPU-based high performance computers are starting to play a significant role in large-scale modeling and data processing. Three of the five most powerful supercomputers in the world take advantage of GPU acceleration. The Tianhe-1A, which is currently ranked #2 on top500.org, uses 364 nVidia Tesla GPUs to reach its peak performance. Our founding members currently donate the equivalent of around 25% of the power of a Tesla based super computer through the utilization of their GPU units thus providing a shining example of how effective a distributed computing system can be in furthering scientific research.

While at only a fraction of the speed of these enormously expensive systems, the GPU Users Group has at its disposal a large amount of combined computing power which is donates for free to research projects hosted on the volunteer computing platform provided by BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Click here to learn more about BOINC and the projects it supports. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ Our members are located around the world yet serve a common goal: promoting scientific research and progress via the facilitation of charitable contributions, and enhancing the effectiveness of research projects by providing free high performance computing power to scientific organizations and their projects.

Aside from monetary and hardware donations, the GPUUG is always looking for new members. If you have spare computing power (or in the case of many of our members, dedicated computing power) that utilizes GPUs and sits idle much of the time, please contact us and we will show you how you can help by harnessing those idle hours for scientific research – right from the comfort of your own home.